Betrayal and Deception: Syria Is a Prime Example of US Foreign Policy

Federico PIERACCINI

Trump announced the withdrawal of US troops who had been protecting the SDF (Syrian democratic forces) in the northeast of Syria, prompting Kurdish leadership and the Damascus governed to strike a deal allowing Syrian Arab Army to retake control of the border with Turkey after nearly six years.

With the US troops withdrawn numbering around 150 to 200 (out of the 2,000 to 3,000 illegally squatting in Syria), it is understood that Trump’s decision is for reasons other than those stated.

The primary impression Trump wishes to convey to his voters is that of keeping his electoral promises, including that of defeating ISIS in Syria, meaning that US troops can now come back home.

Although it is clear (at least to those not under the sway of the mainstream media) that ISIS has not been completely defeated and that the US never really fought against the Caliphate, the impression is nevertheless conveyed that the “Winner-in-Chief” has triumphed and is bringing home the boys.

Given that the deep state retains ultimate control of US foreign policy, Trump is allowed to do and say what he wants – provided it is only within the confines of his media playpen, safe in the knowledge that his motivations are purely electoral and not really aimed and upending the foreign-policy consensus of the US establishment.

If we look beyond Trump’s histrionics, we can see that the US deep state continues its illegal stay in Syria, with Trump in reality having no intention of opposing the military-industrial complex (indeed often appointing its members to serve in his administration), with these two parties finding a common point of agreement in the alleged threat posed by Iran.

US troops will only shift near Iraq, looking at disrupting any form of cooperation between Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran.

Trump’s Saudi and Israeli allies in the region have long been conspiring with the Pentagon to bring down the Islamic Republic of Iran.

That said, the possibility of war with Iran does not align well with Trump’s focus on securing a second term. In any such war, Israel and Saudi Arabia would bear the brunt of hostilities, making pointless their support for Trump. The price of oil would rise sharply, throwing the financial markets into chaos; and all this would conspire to ensure that Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump, therefore, has nothing to gain from war and will prefer dialogue and negotiation with the likes of North Korea, even if it does not bear much fruit.

Trump’s main problem lies in the long-term damage his actions and statements may do to the credibility of the US empire. The photo-op with Kim was criticized by many in mainstream media for giving credibility to a “dictator”. But the anger of the military and intelligence community really lay in leaving Washington with nowhere to go after Trump’s threats of annihilation only led to negotiations that did not go anywhere.

I have previously written about the effectiveness of Pyongyang’s nuclear and conventional deterrence, something well known to US policy makers, making them careful to avoid exposing themselves too much such that Pyongyang calls their bluff, thereby revealing to the world that Washington’s bark is worse than its bite. To avoid such an embarrassing situation, Obama and his predecessors were always careful to refuse to meet with the North Korean leader.

The United States bases much of its military strength on the display of power, advertising its theoretical ability to annihilate anyone anywhere. By North Korea calling its bluff and revealing that the most powerful country in the world cannot in actual fact attack it, the projected image of American invincibility is thus punctured.

Similarly, when Trump announced the withdrawal of US troops from the northeast of Syria (quickly downsized by the Pentagon), and above all gave the green light to Turkey to occupy the area vacated, the political establishment and mainstream media swung into action to dissuade Trump from communicating to the world that America does not stick with its allies. Even Fox News, now siding with the Democrats, started giving wide coverage to Trump’s impeachment story, inviting in the process an angry Twitter response from Trump.

Trump is of course more than aware that a complete US withdrawal from Syria would go against the interests of Riyadh and Tel Aviv, those who actually have an influence on him.

Turkey’s aspirations to occupy the northeast Syria are part of Erdogan’s strategy to improve negotiating positions with Damascus and Moscow with regard to the jihadists in Idlib. Erdogan hopes to be able to annex Syrian territory and fill them with the jihadists and their families who lost the war in Syria and who otherwise pose the security risk of invading Turkey from Idlib. Erdogan seems to have come to some kind of understanding with the US, which has hitherto been the protector of the SDF.

Erdogan and Trump didn’t seem to consider the possibility of the SDF and Damascus finding common ground, but this is exactly what happened.

The Syrian Arab Army is now in the North East of the country, protecting its borders against an invading army. Russia and Iran will try and convince Erdogan to downplay the operation in exchange for some sort of arrangement regarding Idlib. The Syrian government in the near future should be able to take back the rich oil fields, boosting its economy.

Turkey and the US have have for years armed and financed terrorism in the region, as have Qatar and Saudi Arabia (in spite of their ideological differences). Even the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were involved in the destabilization of Syria.

All this chaos is ultimately supervised and directed by the United States, which has for years been coordinating in the region color revolutions, the Arab Spring, and proxy wars. Any other interpretation of events would be disingenuous and untruthful.

The withdrawal of US troops from Syria simply reinforces Damascus’s position as the only legitimate authority in Syria, undermines confidence of European allies in the US, and emphasizes the consistency of Moscow’s actions, which has always been opposed to Washington’s chaotic actions in the region.

Amidst this generalized chaos and confusion, Russia, Iran and Syria are trying to put the house back in order again, which includes the international system where sovereign states are respected.

The unipolarists have been suffering pronounced setbacks of late. The expensive air-defense systems of the United States were shown by the Houthis in the last month to be rather ineffectual; Saudi troops soon after this suffered a humiliating defeat in the south of their own country; Washington saw its high-tech drone shot down by Iran; and numerous European and Middle Eastern allies have lost faith in the US, as they watch factions fighting with each other over control for US foreign policy

The US is the victim of a unipolar world order onto which it desperately hangs without any thought of letting go, even as the rest of the world inexorably moves towards a multipolar world order, one that becomes ever more difficult to subdue with every waking day.

Federico PIERACCINI

Independent freelance writer specialized in international affairs, conflicts, politics and strategies

The Road to Damascus: How the Syria War was Won

Following the Damascus-Kurdish alliance, Syria may become the biggest defeat for the Central Intelligence Agency since Vietnam, says Pepe Escobar.

Pepe ESCOBAR

What is happening in Syria, following yet another Russia-brokered deal, is a massive geopolitical game-changer. I’ve tried to summarize it in a single paragraph this way:

“It’s a quadruple win. The U.S. performs a face saving withdrawal, which Trump can sell as avoiding a conflict with NATO ally Turkey. Turkey has the guarantee – by the Russians – that the Syrian Army will be in control of the Turkish-Syrian border. Russia prevents a war escalation and keeps the Russia-Iran-Turkey peace process alive.  And Syria will eventually regain control of the entire northeast.”

Syria may be the biggest defeat for the CIA since Vietnam.

Yet that hardly begins to tell the whole story.

Allow me to briefly sketch in broad historical strokes how we got here.

It began with an intuition I felt last month at the tri-border point of Lebanon, Syria and Occupied Palestine; followed by a subsequent series of conversations in Beirut with first-class Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian, Russian, French and Italian analysts; all resting on my travels in Syria since the 1990s; with a mix of selected bibliography in French available at Antoine’s in Beirut thrown in.

The Vilayets

Let’s start in the 19thcentury when Syria consisted of six vilayets — Ottoman provinces — without counting Mount Lebanon, which had a special status since 1861 to the benefit of Maronite Christians and Jerusalem, which was a sanjak (administrative division) of Istanbul.

The vilayets did not define the extremely complex Syrian identity: for instance, Armenians were the majority in the vilayet of Maras, Kurds in Diyarbakir – both now part of Turkey in southern Anatolia – and the vilayets of Aleppo and Damascus were both Sunni Arab.

Nineteenth century Ottoman Syria was the epitome of cosmopolitanism. There were no interior borders or walls. Everything was inter-dependent.

Ethnic groups in the Balkans and Asia Minor, early 20th Century, 
Historical Atlas, 1911.

Then the Europeans, profiting from World War I, intervened. France got the Syrian-Lebanese littoral, and later the vilayets of Maras and Mosul (today in Iraq). Palestine was separated from Cham (the “Levant”), to be internationalized. The vilayet of Damascus was cut in half: France got the north, the Brits got the south. Separation between Syria and the mostly Christian Lebanese lands came later.

There was always the complex question of the Syria-Iraq border. Since antiquity, the Euphrates acted as a barrier, for instance between the Cham of the Umayyads and their fierce competitors on the other side of the river, the Mesopotamian Abbasids.

James Barr, in his splendid “A Line in the Sand,” notes, correctly, that the Sykes-Picot agreement imposed on the Middle East the European conception of territory: their “line in the sand” codified a delimited separation between nation-states. The problem is, there were no nation-states in region in the early 20thcentury.

The birth of Syria as we know it was a work in progress, involving the Europeans, the Hashemite dynasty, nationalist Syrians invested in building a Greater Syria including Lebanon, and the Maronites of Mount Lebanon. An important factor is that few in the region lamented losing dependence on Hashemite Medina, and except the Turks, the loss of the vilayet of Mosul in what became Iraq after World War I.

In 1925, Sunnis became the de facto prominent power in Syria, as the French unified Aleppo and Damascus. During the 1920s France also established the borders of eastern Syria. And the Treaty of Lausanne, in 1923, forced the Turks to give up all Ottoman holdings but didn’t keep them out of the game.

Turkish borders according to the Treaty of 
Lausanne, 1923.

The Turks soon started to encroach on the French mandate, and began blocking the dream of Kurdish autonomy. France in the end gave in: the Turkish-Syrian border would parallel the route of the fabledBagdadbahn — the Berlin-Baghdad railway.

In the 1930s France gave in even more: the sanjak of Alexandretta (today’s Iskenderun, in Hatay province, Turkey), was finally annexed by Turkey in 1939 when only 40 percent of the population was Turkish.

The annexation led to the exile of tens of thousands of Armenians. It was a tremendous blow for Syrian nationalists. And it was a disaster for Aleppo, which lost its corridor to the Eastern Mediterranean.

Turkish forces under entered Alexandretta 
on July 5, 1938.

This emergent Syria — out of conflicting Turkish, French, British and myriad local interests —obviously could not, and did not, please any community. Still, the heart of the nation configured what was described as “useful Syria.” No less than 60 percent of the nation was — and remains — practically void.Yet, geopolitically, that translates into “strategic depth” — the heart of the matter in the current war.To the eastern steppes, Syria was all about Bedouin tribes. To the north, it was all about the Turkish-Kurdish clash. And to the south, the border was a mirage in the desert, only drawn with the advent of Transjordan. Only the western front, with Lebanon, was established, and consolidated after WWII.

From Hafez to Bashar

Starting in 1963, the Baath party, secular and nationalist, took over Syria, finally consolidating its power in 1970 with Hafez al-Assad, who instead of just relying on his Alawite minority, built a humongous, hyper-centralized state machinery mixed with a police state. The key actors who refused to play the game were the Muslim Brotherhood, all the way to being massacred during the hardcore 1982 Hama repression.

Secularism and a police state: that’s how the fragile Syrian mosaic was preserved. But already in the 1970s major fractures were emerging: between major cities and a very poor periphery; between the “useful” west and the Bedouin east; between Arabs and Kurds. But the urban elites never repudiated the iron will of Damascus: cronyism, after all, was quite profitable.

Damascus interfered heavily with the Lebanese civil war since 1976 at the invitation of the Arab League as a “peacekeeping force.” In Hafez al-Assad’s logic, stressing the Arab identity of Lebanon was essential to recover Greater Syria. But Syrian control over Lebanon started to unravel in 2005, after the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, very close to Saudi Arabia, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) eventually left.

Bashar al-Assad had taken power in 2000. Unlike his father, he bet on the Alawites to run the state machinery, preventing the possibility of a coup but completely alienating himself from the poor, Syrian on the street.

What the West defined as the Arab Spring, began in Syria in March 2011; it was a revolt against the Alawites as much  as a revolt against Damascus. Totally instrumentalized by the foreign interests, the revolt sprang up in extremely poor, dejected Sunni peripheries: Deraa in the south, the deserted east, and the suburbs of Damascus and Aleppo.

Protest in Damascus, April 24, 2011. 
(syriana2011/Flickr)

What was not understood in the West is that this “beggars banquet” was not against the Syrian nation, but against a “regime.” Jabhat al-Nusra, in a P.R. exercise, even broke its official link with al-Qaeda and changed its denomination to Fatah al-Cham and then Hayat Tahrir al-Cham (“Organization for the Liberation of the Levant”). Only ISIS/Daesh said they were fighting for the end of Sykes-Picot.

By 2014, the perpetually moving battlefield was more or less established: Damascus against both Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS/Daesh, with a wobbly role for the Kurds in the northeast, obsessed in preserving the cantons of Afrin, Kobane and Qamichli.

But the key point is that each katiba (“combat group”), each neighborhood, each village, and in fact each combatant was in-and-out of allegiances non-stop. That yielded a dizzying nebulae of jihadis, criminals, mercenaries, some linked to al-Qaeda, some to Daesh, some trained by the Americans, some just making a quick buck.

For instance Salafis — lavishly financed by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — especially Jaish al-Islam, even struck alliances with the PYD Kurds in Syria and the jihadis of Hayat Tahrir al-Cham (the remixed, 30,000-strong  al-Qaeda in Syria). Meanwhile, the PYD Kurds (an emanation of the Turkish Kurds’ PKK, which Ankara consider “terrorists”) profited from this unholy mess — plus a deliberate ambiguity by Damascus – to try to create their autonomous Rojava.

A demonstration in the city of Afrin in support 
of the YPG against the Turkish invasion of Afrin, 
Jan. 19, 2018. (Voice of America Kurdish, Wikimedia Commons)

That Turkish Strategic Depth

Turkey was all in. Turbo-charged by the neo-Ottoman politics of former Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, the logic was to reconquer parts of the Ottoman empire, and get rid of Assad because he had helped PKK Kurdish rebels in Turkey.

Davutoglu’s Strategik Derinlik (“Strategic Depth’), published in 2001, had been a smash hit in Turkey, reclaiming the glory of eight centuries of an sprawling empire, compared to puny 911 kilometers of borders fixed by the French and the Kemalists. Bilad al Cham, the Ottoman province congregating Lebanon, historical Palestine, Jordan and Syria, remained a powerful magnet in both the Syrian and Turkish unconscious.

No wonder Turkey’s Recep Erdogan was fired up: in 2012 he even boasted he was getting ready to pray in the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, post-regime change, of course. He has been gunning for a safe zone inside the Syrian border — actually a Turkish enclave — since 2014. To get it, he has used a whole bag of nasty players — from militias close to the Muslim Brotherhood to hardcore Turkmen gangs.

With the establishment of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), for the first time Turkey allowed foreign weaponized groups to operate on its own territory. A training camp was set up in 2011 in the sanjakof Alexandretta. The Syrian National Council was also created in Istanbul – a bunch of non-entities from the diaspora who had not been in Syria for decades.

Ankara enabled a de facto Jihad Highway — with people from Central Asia, Caucasus, Maghreb, Pakistan, Xinjiang, all points north in Europe being smuggled back and forth at will. In 2015, Ankara, Riyadh and Doha set up the dreaded Jaish al-Fath (“Army of Conquest”), which included Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Qaeda).

At the same time, Ankara maintained an extremely ambiguous relationship with ISIS/Daesh, buying its smuggled oil, treating jihadis in Turkish hospitals, and paying zero attention to jihad intel collected and developed on Turkish territory. For at least five years, the MIT — Turkish intelligence – provided political and logistic background to the Syrian opposition while weaponizing a galaxy of Salafis. After all, Ankara believed that ISIS/Daesh only existed because of the “evil” deployed by the Assad regime.

The Russian Factor

Russian President Vladiimir Putin meeting with President 
of Turkey Recep Erdogan; Russian Minister of Foreign 
Affairs Sergei Lavrov standing in background, Ankara, 
Dec. 1, 2014 Ankara. (Kremlin)

The first major game-changer was the spectacular Russian entrance in the summer of 2015. Vladimir Putin had asked the U.S. to join in the fight against the Islamic State as the Soviet Union allied against Hitler, negating the American idea that this was Russia’s bid to restore its imperial glory. But the American plan instead, under Barack Obama, was single-minded: betting on a rag-tag Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a mix of Kurds and Sunni Arabs, supported by air power and U.S. Special Forces, north of the Euphrates, to smash ISIS/Daesh all the way to Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor.

Raqqa, bombed to rubble by the Pentagon, may have been taken by the SDF, but Deir ez-Zor was taken by Damascus’s Syrian Arab Army. The ultimate American aim was to consistently keep the north of the Euphrates under U.S. power, via their proxies, the SDF and the Kurdish PYD/YPG. That American dream is now over, lamented by imperial Democrats and Republicans alike.

The CIA will be after Trump’s scalp till Kingdom Come.

Kurdish Dream Over

Talk about a cultural misunderstanding. As much as the Syrian Kurds believed U.S. protection amounted to an endorsement of their independence dreams, Americans never seemed to understand that throughout the “Greater Middle East” you cannot buy a tribe. At best, you can rent them. And they use you according to their interests. I’ve seen it from Afghanistan to Iraq’s Anbar province.

The Kurdish dream of a contiguous, autonomous territory from Qamichli to Manbij is over. Sunni Arabs living in this perimeter will resist any Kurdish attempt at dominance.

The Syrian PYD was founded in 2005 by PKK militants. In 2011, Syrians from the PKK came from Qandil – the PKK base in northern Iraq – to build the YPG militia for the PYD. In predominantly Arab zones, Syrian Kurds are in charge of governing because for them Arabs are seen as a bunch of barbarians, incapable of building their “democratic, socialist, ecological and multi-communitarian” society.

Kurdish PKK guerillas In Kirkuk, Iraq. 
(Kurdishstruggle via Flickr)

One can imagine how conservative Sunni Arab tribal leaders hate their guts. There’s no way these tribal leaders will ever support the Kurds against the SAA or the Turkish army; after all these Arab tribal leaders spent a lot of time in Damascus seeking support from Bashar al-Assad.  And now the Kurds themselves have accepted that support in the face of the Trukish incursion, greenlighted by Trump.

East of Deir ez-Zor, the PYD/YPG already had to say goodbye to the region that is responsible for 50 percent of Syria’s oil production. Damascus and the SAA now have the upper hand. What’s left for the PYD/YPG is to resign themselves to Damascus’s and Russian protection against Turkey, and the chance of exercising sovereignty in exclusively Kurdish territories.

Ignorance of the West

The West, with typical Orientalist haughtiness, never understood that Alawites, Christians, Ismailis and Druze in Syria would always privilege Damascus for protection compared to an “opposition” monopolized by hardcore Islamists, if not jihadis.  The West also did not understand that the government in Damascus, for survival, could always count on formidable Baath party networks plus the dreaded mukhabarat — the intel services.

Rebuilding Syria

The reconstruction of Syria may cost as much as $200 billion. Damascus has already made it very clear that the U.S. and the EU are not welcome. China will be in the forefront, along with Russia and Iran; this will be a project strictly following the Eurasia integration playbook — with the Chinese aiming to revive Syria’s strategic positioning in the Ancient Silk Road.

As for Erdogan, distrusted by virtually everyone, and a tad less neo-Ottoman than in the recent past, he now seems to have finally understood that Bashar al-Assad “won’t go,” and he must live with it. Ankara is bound to remain imvolved with Tehran and Moscow, in finding a comprehensive, constitutional solution for the Syrian tragedy through the former “Astana process”, later developed in Ankara.

The war may not have been totally won, of course. But against all odds, it’s clear a unified, sovereign Syrian nation is bound to prevail over every perverted strand of geopolitical molotov cocktails concocted in sinister NATO/GCC labs. History will eventually tell us that, as an example to the whole Global South, this will remain the ultimate game-changer.

consortiumnews.com

Civil War in the US: 1861, 2019… 2074?

The Reds and the Blues never went away

Kevin Barrett

The American Civil War — also known as the War Between the States and (among folks who fly Confederate flags from their pickup trucks) the War of Northern Aggression — is said to have ended in 1865. But is it really over?

Today the USA is mired in political crisis. One of the key dividing lines, the one that dominates presidential elections, is the Red state vs. Blue state schism. Today’s “Confederate” states are still Red. Today’s “Union” states are still Blue. Both sides are still wearing their civil war uniforms!

The key issues are still race and economic exploitation. The original Civil War was fought over economic interests including slavery. The northern oligarchs favored massive immigration of de facto slaves for their factories, and tariffs to force southerners to buy the products thus produced. The southern oligarchs, for their part, sought to maintain the plantation system built on the backs of enslaved black people — and also wanted to buy goods from Europe tariff-free.

Today Americans are still fighting over race, immigration, and economics. The Red side — the Trump supporters — are economically-stressed whites who are panicking over their impending minority status (America is slated to have a nonwhite majority by around 2050). The Red forces are suspicious of African-Americans. They agree with Trump that pro-Confederate-statue marchers in Charlottesville were not bad people. And the Reds don’t like Hispanics much either. They want to slow the immigration that is changing America’s demographics. They lap up Trump’s slanderous descriptions of Hispanics as rapists and criminals. “Build that wall!” they chant at Trump rallies.

Their opponents, the Blues, crusade against racism (and “sexism” and “anti-Semitism” and “LGBTQ-phobia”) the way their blue state ancestors crusaded against slavery, though perhaps with less reason. Like the Unionists of the original Civil War, today’s Blue side favors centralized federal power. They don’t want to let states and individuals go their own way. They evince an odd combination of militarism and idealism. “We must free the world!” the Yankees chant as they march off with their guns to force others to accept their ideals and way of life.

Like the Red and Blue sides of the original Civil War, today’s Reds and Blues are manipulated by oligarchs. The Red oligarchs — people like the Koch brothers, the Scaife Family Foundation, and Robert Mercer — tend to espouse “libertarianism,” meaning freedom to exploit (for billionaires), and freedom to starve (for working people). The Red oligarchs, especially the Koch Brothers, are heavily invested in fossil fuel. They protect their investments by funding scientists and activists who doubt carbon-driven climate change. Many of them, including the notorious Las Vegas godfather Sheldon Adelson, are rabid Likudnik Zionists.

Today’s Blue oligarchs tend to be Hollywood moguls, Silicon Valley billionaires, or hedge fund managers. The majority appear to be Jewish — see Forbes Magazine’s article “Hillary Clinton’s Top Donors” for the names. Hillary’s biggest donor, Haim Saban, calls himself “a one-issue guy” with the issue being Israel.

As was the case during the original Civil War, the Red oligarchs are fighting to save an outmoded economic system. This time it is fossil-fuel-driven “libertarian” capitalism rather than slavery. They want to keep using the “virtual slavery” represented by fossil fuel energy (today the average American uses the daily fossil fuel energy equivalent of about 100 slaves). And they also want to preserve the “virtual slavery” of the so-called free market, which forces ordinary people to scratch and claw to join the wage-slave workforce and accept less and less pay for ever-longer hours amidst deteriorating infrastructure and disappearing amenities.

The Blue oligarchs, or at least some of them, are more open to the two biggest disruptive economic realities of the future: the end of both fossil fuels and wage labor as the basis of post-industrial society. Fossil fuels will probably disappear for environmental reasons even before they are depleted, which will happen sooner than the industry admits. And wage labor will no longer exist in its current form within a few decades as automation destroys jobs faster than they can be replaced.

But will we ever arrive at this post-fossil-fuel, post-wage-labor future? Or will civilization in general, or the US in particular, collapse — or perhaps even degenerate into out-and-out civil war?

Egyptian-American writer Omar el-Akkad’s notable 2017 novel American War envisions the worst. In el-Akkad’s dystopian future, the current 9/11-instigated War on Muslims mutates into the War on Southerners — but has nothing to do with race. Instead, the Yankee Terror State turns its savagery against the New Rebels of the Free Southern States because those good ole boys and girls refuse to give up fossil fuels, choosing instead to secede from the Union.

Egypt-born, Qatar- and Canada-raised, and Portland, Oregon-based, el-Akkad has worked as a reporter and covered important global stories including the war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantanamo Bay, the “Arab Spring” in Egypt, and the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri. “American War” envisions a second American Civil War at the end of the 21st century. Within the story, which is told through the eyes of one family, climate change has resulted in political upheaval and devastating violence, and the country’s population is further diminished by a plague. The novel’s protagonist, Sarat Chestnut, is just six years old in 2074 when conflict results in a war breaking out. Many of man’s fears have come to pass: fossil fuels are outlawed, many coastal regions of the US are submerged by encroaching oceans, and drones fly overhead with frequency. Sarat’s father is killed and her family enters a camp for displaced persons, where she meets an older man and is converted into a weapon of war herself.

El-Akkad’s vision of Blue vs. Red global-warming-driven war run amok in a near-future America that has completely forgotten about the whole concept of race is surprisingly plausible, at least while you are reading it (some say Civil War I, after all, was really about economics not race, so why shouldn’t Civil War II also be over an economic issue?). The plot turns on the adventures of Sarat, a young Red State woman of mixed and meaningless (near-black Chicano and po’ white trash) ancestry who awakens politically and goes after the Blue State occupiers in pretty much the same way the Iraqi Resistance went after George W. Bush’s storm troopers.

Unlike most dystopian science fiction, American War is not just showing us a terrible future that is really an exaggerated (we hope) depiction of the present-day world we live in. El-Akkad’s fictional 2074 America is not so much a pessimistic caricature of actual 2017 America as a wish-fulfillment dream envisioning Americans karmically reaping what they’ve sown in their War on Muslims, euphemistically known as the “war on terror.” The horrors that Sarat and other Southerners experience under Yankee occupation — drone killings, rape, massacres, torture, internment camps, orange jumpsuits — are precisely those that Muslims have been experiencing since the false-flag event of September 11, 2001. Sarat’s fictional resistance, which culminates in a fantastically horrific act of revenge against the Yankees, represents gratifying fantasy payback for the real-life Terror War’s murder of 32 million Muslims, and a prescient and timely warning about what GWOT is likely to lead to. The whole thing is premised on helping the American/Western reader empathetically imagine what the post-9/11 world looks like to Muslims in general and resistance fighters in particular: el-Akkad fosters empathy and identification with America’s victims by casting the archetypal victim-turned-resistance-fighter as ordinary American rather than exotic foreigner.

Omar el-Akkad’s bleak vision of American War circa 2074 may turn out to have been overly optimistic. It seems entirely possible that an American economic-and-environmental-collapse-driven civil war could break out much earlier. The current American president, Donald Trump, is enthusiastically backed by a well-armed segment of the population — a segment that is disproportionately represented in the military and police forces. Yet not only Trump’s opponents, but also some members of his cabinet, believe he is so incompetent that he should be removed in accordance with the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution. The ferocity and extremism of both pro-Trump and anti-Trump forces, especially if the US succumbs to economic collapse or some other genuine emergency (as opposed to Trump’s phony border emergency) could conceivably lead to massive civil unrest or even civil war.

The Qur’an tells us to gaze on the ruins of collapsed civilizations and meditate on the moral implications, “Have they, then, never journeyed about the earth and beheld what happened in the end to those [deniers of the truth] who lived before their time? Greater were they in power than they are, and in the impact they left on earth: but Allah took them to task for their sins, and they had none to defend them against Allah” (40:21). If the US continues on its current path of truth denial and moral degeneracy, its collapse into ruins — accompanied by some form of extreme civil strife — may be inevitable.

 

Kevin Barrett